Extending Your Reach from Blogger to Influencer

You’ve probably noticed that if you take a break from blog promotion your traffic number stagnate and quickly start dropping. Sometimes all it takes is a day or two and you’re back to square one. Yet we hear these big-name bloggers talking about taking a couple of weeks or a month off to go sit on some tropical island and sip Mai-Tai’s all the time. How do they do it? Most of them have moved on from the realm of lowly bloggers, up to the world of influencers. Let’s take a look at influencer marketing.

What Is An Influencer?

An Influencer is someone people respect and look up to as the ultimate source for information in a given niche. Generally, they have a large number of followers in the social networks and/or their blogs, but keep in mind “large” is a relative term and quality always trumps quantity.

How Can An Influencer Help You?

You may not be an influencer yet, but by networking with bloggers who are, they can help extend your reach deeper into the marketplace. When an influencer shares a link on Twitter, people click on it. When they recommend a blog to their Facebook followers, people visit. When they link out to you from their own blog their readers sit up and take notice. The simple act of being recommended by an influencer boosts your credibility among his or her followers.

How Can Your Hook Up With Influencers?

In my experience there are two types of influencers. The first chooses to collaborate with other bloggers because they know it helps everyone. It’s easier to connect with these folks. When you see their tweets, give them a retweet, share their blog posts with your Facebook followers, leave insightful comments on their blogs and link out to them from your blog posts. It won’t take long and you’ll see them start returning the favor.

The other type of influencer is the type that lets his status go to his head. Unfortunately, a nod from these guys is still pretty valuable and can really bring in the traffic. Unfortunately, too, these guys rarely look to see who’s retweeting their tweets or sharing their links. Most of them have thousands of followers but they don’t follow anyone themselves. They’re too busy and they have so much traffic they don’t really care. It takes longer to get these guys to notice you but, unfortunately (again), it’s worth the effort because their reach into cyberspace is so extensive.

How Can You Become An Influencer?

The most important step is to make sure you’re always providing top-quality content that people want to share. Becoming an influencer doesn’t happen over night. Connecting with other influencers and collaborating with other bloggers helps extend your own reach, but it all comes down to your own content. It has to be content worth sharing and it has to be content that shows the reader you’re the authority in your niche.